


Fits & Starts

by Gildedmuse



Category: Rent (2005), Rent - Larson
Genre: Break Up, Character Study, Drug Use, F/M, Gen, One Shot, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Pre-Canon, The Filmmaker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 18:21:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18665842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gildedmuse/pseuds/Gildedmuse
Summary: For Mark it all starts with a camera.





	Fits & Starts

**Author's Note:**

> [Posted to LJ in 2007]

**Fits & Starts**

  
It starts with a boy and his camera.  
  
No, backtrack. It starts with a boy in his room, bored and afraid to jack off with his sister only a wall away. It starts when he wanders down into the house and finds an old family camcorder they haven’t used since their trip to Disney land four years ago. It starts even before that, one rainy summer at his aunts house when all there was to do was checkers and watch Indian Jones on repeat until Mark know the lines better than Ford did.  
  
It starts when his mom catches him in his room his mattress off his bed to make a cave, and instead of yelling at him for trying to reenact every moment of the film tells him she supports his creative endeavors, but if he doesn’t clean up when he is done she is going to kill him, and she doesn’t think they have video cameras were he will be going.  
  
It starts in a high school film class that isn’t really so much a film class as listening to a teacher drone on about how hard it is to make it in film. It starts when Mark hears he needs a degree and so fights with the SATS and finals until he can make himself look good on a college application.  
  
It starts with a roommate at Brown who needs Mark to be quiet because he’s only there on a scholarship. And he explains how he dreams of giving this old girl he likes, Sarah or Stephanie or Simone or something, this place where she can paint in peace without having to worry about production and advertising and other ways to make money while being an artist and even though Mark never hears about this girl again, it starts when he falls in love with the idea of being free from everything but art.  
  
It starts with a man who calls himself a vagabond, a wandering professor and Mark laughs because he doesn’t think he’s serious. This supposed vagabond spends every Tuesday and Thursday in front of an auditorium full of students frantically scribbling notes, nodding at everything he says and speaking up to mention what other teachers have told them to think about Nietzsche, Proudhon, Marx.  
  
It starts when Mark thinks he’s finally got the message and he puts down his notes and just starts to listen to Collins without thinking about grades or impressing the teacher. He just wants to soak in what this man is telling them. No more rules, boundaries, limitations. It starts when Mark stops being the product of all the forces in his life and decides he just wants to be himself, a filmmaker, someone amazing and not someone taught to be amazing.  
  
It starts when Collins says, “They cannot teach you everything. They can teach you what people have thought, but they cannot teach you how to think. They can teach you the past but not the possibilities. They cannot teach you talent or passion, originality or experience. They cannot teach you art.”  
  
They never taught Mark any of that, anyway.  
  
It starts when he meets a boy and his guitar.  
  
No.  
  
It starts when Collins takes him to New York to meet a boy with a guitar. A boy he will like, according to Collins, because he’s passionate and alive, and Mark needs those things. He needs to stop thinking that passion is something on day time TV. He needs to see what art feels like.  
  
He is taken to meet a boy and his guitar, but really Mark meets a boy and his guitar and his addiction and his girlfriend and his scribble notebooks of half finished songs and his way of staying in the shower way too long when he has a thought and his emotions swaying back and fourth but never settling anywhere and his eyes burning at Mark not out of hate but because something in him just seems to always be lit up and who couldn’t possibly have room for anything more.  
  
It starts with Mark in the city, standing alone with his camera as the whole street hums and vibrates around him, life pushing at him from all sides, colliding into him without saying sorry. Collins goes to another school, Roger has nothing to say to him, and in a city with action, action, action, Mark has nothing but his camera.  
  
It starts in such a small way, a sharp, small in slowly twisting itself beneath his skin that he barely notices. If he had, he would have called Collins, talked about it not in terms of “I feel…” or “I am…” but in terms of, “People now a days feel…” and “The world is…” to hide from the effects that it’s having on him.  
  
It starts feeling a lot like emptiness, and Mark fills it with tape reels of film. Stock piled up and compressed down inside him it starts to get harder to notice the isolation of the city dragging around all the footage that he does. Shot a scene, write a story, don’t think about how the rest of the city wouldn’t notice if he was there or not. Mark wants to make an impression and ends up disappearing into the dark alleys and crooks of New York just like every one before him.  
  
It starts with a girl who has a smile that is a mix between beautiful and terrifying. She dates him and sleeps with him and tries to crack him open and get him to really feel something and when that doesn’t work she starts to look around for someone who loves her and not just the sex and the idea of being in love with her.  
  
Maureen says Mark only dated her because it would look good on film, but Mark refuses to believe that. Roger says Mark only dated her because she was cute, and Mark doesn’t feel like that is right either. He isn’t sure what made Maureen so tempting that even when she calls and says, “Look, I don’t think this is working, I’m a lesbian.” Mark still wants to be in love with her.  
  
When he asks, Roger says it started even after that.  
  
It starts with a girl. Not Maureen, but a smaller girl with thin lips and heavy, dark eyes. It starts not with a girl, but with a body.  
  
It started with a needle, Roger tells him, and the music and the girl who loved them both and it all seemed to slip away from him. At least that is where it starts for Roger, and for Mark it starts right after that, when Roger can’t go to his girlfriend’s funereal because he’s too high to get out of bed.  
  
It starts when Mark drops to his bed, hearing Roger in the next room crying out for a girl that isn’t there. He lifts his scripts up from his bed, glancing over the stiff lines of dialogue with planned shots and simple plot. He looks from the paper stained with ink to the wall where he can almost visualize Roger clawing at his arms.  
  
He wonders when Collins moved away and Mark stopped listening to him, and when Roger slipped so far that Mark has to lock him into his room to stop him from passively killing himself. He wonders when Maureen stopped trying to force him out of his film world. He wondered when his life seemed to slow and the stop all-together.   
  
He tosses the script away, and that is where it starts.


End file.
